Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (43 page)

The next morning, we were led across the stream. On the far side, spear-wielding men in loincloths jumped out of the bush, yelling savagely, and we nearly jumped out of our skins; this, we later learned, was part of the traditional ceremony performed for even a local guest.
Just beyond the spear-bearers, a group of village men were waiting for us, and in double file they led us into the village, playing bamboo panpipes, bent at the waist and swaying with the music. The sound was a cross between a steel drum’s and a bassoon’s; the movement, primal Martha Graham. They led us through an esplanade of ferns, up to the higher part of the village, where the women put on each of us a necklace of seeds and a headband of flowers, inviting us to sit on a sort of porch attached to the biggest hut. The music got richer and wilder. Big pipes in the central clearing, some seven feet tall, were propped on wooden stands, and the villagers played these as if they were a giant vibraphone, with the soles of rubber flip-flops for mallets.

The villagers asked what we wanted to see. We wanted to know how they built a hut, so they gathered sago palm leaves and showed us how to fold them over rods of wild betel-nut wood and sew them with rattan and layer them to form a roof or wall. They showed us how to rub
gahuto
sticks to start a fire, how to weave traps from
aohe
roots, and how to make a pudding by grinding up smoked
ngali
nuts in a giant mortar and pestle, mixing them with taro, stuffing it all into the central part of a bamboo rod, and roasting it in a fire. Finally, they showed us how they carved the rough but elegant wooden bowls from which we had been eating. We stayed the afternoon learning all these things and trying to imitate, in our appreciation, what might be local etiquette. If I had come in search of another world, I had found it.

Back at our hut, hens were trying to lay eggs on our sleeping mats, and when we had straightened that out, we ate eels caught that day (with ramen noodles). After dinner, we were preparing to go to bed when we heard the sound of music again. It’s hard to say that any of what we had seen was artificial; greeting ceremonies are so rare that they are partially reinvented on each occasion, and no foreigners had come to Hauta in a long, long time. But this sudden playing at night was completely spontaneous. Someone had felt like music, and the mood had spread. The pipers came to our hut with their instruments and played under the full moon, with the women singing at the back in chorus, and we listened for perhaps an hour to this abrupt beauty,
so festive, so strange. Then they asked whether we had music in our culture, and when we said we did, they wanted to hear it. Suddenly we were the exotics. After a hurried consultation, the four of us decided to sing “Oklahoma!” and “Jamaica Farewell” and “America the Beautiful.” They asked whether we had other kinds of performance in our culture. Maybe dance? So Jessica and I stepped down, and to the eerie music of bamboo pipes in a clearing in the rainforest under a springtime moon, on the uneven ground at the top of a mountain, we did swing dancing; and when we did a dip at the end, we got hoots and hollers, and the music ramped up, and the mood lasted, miraculous as loaves and fishes.

We spent two days coming back down. While the carriers took the same steep route we’d followed on the way up, to keep our belongings dry, we took a gentler one that involved, however, more river crossings, including one swim across deep rapids (in our clothes—there was no way to keep anything dry). By this time we had become close to our guides and talked to them about all kinds of things, trying to answer all their questions and explain our lives: what big cities were like, and why we had all spent so many years in school, and the rules of football, and why we didn’t know anything about farming. One of the party had brought along his panpipes and played as we descended, and the birds called to one another through the rain.

When we reached the shore, we went out for a walk without our guides, and along the beach we offered candy to children, who ran away as soon as we talked to them. “Hi!” we kept saying as we distributed the sweets, only to discover later that
hi
means “copulate” in the local language (in which the word for “father” is
mama
). Then we had another brief comedy: in this tropical land, no one thinks of sunbathing, and when one of our party lay down on the beach, villagers assumed he must be fighting the chills of malaria and came to provide remedies.

Following our sojourn on Makira, we chartered the Solomons’ only real yacht, the thirty-five-foot catamaran
Lalae
, to take us island-hopping. After a week of jungle climbing and mud and sleeping with chickens, the immaculate white of the boat, the homemade chocolate
cake, the attentive service, and the always-full basket of fresh fruit were a revelation. The boat is built for fishing, and I caught a large barracuda the one time I threw a line overboard. Our dashing captain, Steve Goodhew, a veteran of the Australian Royal Navy, caught an eight-foot marlin and a host of smaller fish.

Our first port of call was a swimming-with-dolphins resort being built on Gavutu Island under the auspices of a rather tough Canadian animal behaviorist. We were greeted with the resort’s custom dancing. The male performers wore loincloths—the local word is
kabilato
—and the women, grass skirts and tops made of seashells, and all had armbands with long grasses stuck in them (John called them the Scallion Dancers). Here I ran up against the constant problem of the would-be adventurer: by and large what you discover has been discovered before, and even people doing the same thing they did a thousand years ago are not really doing the same thing if a veneer of self-consciousness has been added to the enterprise. These performers were proud of their performance and it was all correct to their tradition, but after that spontaneous night in the mountains, we were spoiled, and this practiced exhibition tilted too much toward the Hawaiian nightclub show. In the capital, we had gone to the Miss Solomon Islands beauty pageant, which featured gyrating women wearing grass skirts made of shredded pink plastic bags and bikini tops of coconuts and string—which was comical and rather endearing because it had an absurdist element, but it was also a little sad. This felt sad, too: an enactment of tradition rather than tradition itself.

So we were all the more delighted when we got to Loisolin, on Pavuvu, where Steve had made arrangements the month before on our behalf. The islanders had been excited by the prospect of greeting us; though they were known locally for their dancing and, living on the coast, had met some foreigners, no tourist had ever come to their village before with the express objective of seeing them. When we arrived, the entire population was waiting onshore. A few launched canoes and circled our boat; then the spear warriors rushed out into the surf and yelled madly and made the usual friendly, threatening gestures. When we came ashore, little girls out of Gauguin put garlands
of frangipani around our necks, and we were welcomed by the chief, who wore a remarkable headband of densely packed possum teeth. A bamboo band played harmonies more sophisticated than those we’d heard in the jungle. Then each of us got a coconut from which to drink, and a leaf basket with a whole lobster, a slice of taro, coconut pudding, cassava pudding, fresh fish, two further kinds of taro with slippery cabbage (a slimy, local green), and hard-boiled megapode eggs. As we ate, a few young women fanned us and our food with large leaves to make sure that no flies came our way.

Meanwhile, some forty villagers, many covered in body paint, performed a sequence of complex dances that ranged from the mesmeric to the passionate, the humorous to the mournful. It was as if the George Balanchine of the South Pacific had been working on Pavuvu. The women, in grasses and shells, did a poetic welcome dance in which they imitated the motion of the waves; the men leaped about like young rams. The rhythms were multilayered, almost syncopated, and then lyrical and sweet. At the end, they asked us to show them something from our culture, and when Jessica and I did our swing-dancing number, they cheered and cheered and wouldn’t let us stop until we were completely exhausted.

In the long afternoon light, when we and they could dance no more, we set sail and passed great schools of flying fish that soared above the water for five hundred feet; a pod of about two hundred dolphins that came and played all around us, in such numbers that they seemed to be waves, suffusing the air with exuberance; terns and frigate birds and brown boobies; and perfect little islands like the ones in children’s books, dome-shaped, living-room-size, uninhabited, and bedecked with five perfect coconut palms. Occasionally we saw fishermen in dugout canoes waiting to spear fish. We were caught in an endless postcard, a Pacific arcadia, and we sang and talked and drank local beer on the front deck.

Many of the smaller islands in the Solomons are coral atolls, and these are concentrated around the Marovo Lagoon, the world’s largest island-enclosed lagoon, which may soon be protected by UNESCO. Marovo was described by James Michener as the eighth wonder of the world and was the object of our sailing trip. Over four days,
we stopped at various isolated spots in the lagoon for snorkeling, including Uepi, where the variety and density of species outclasses that of the Great Barrier Reef. I saw huge schools of chromides, black-tipped reef sharks and gray whale sharks, a dozen kinds of parrot fish, various wrasses, including the endangered Maori wrasse, angelfish, squirrelfish, clown fish, hawksbill turtles, eels, butterfish, a manta ray, foul-looking groupers, giant clams with fluorescent pink and lavender mouths that closed when you approached, needle-nosed gars, many-spotted sweetlips, mudskippers, lionfish, black-and-blue sea snakes, electric-blue starfish. It was an underwater safari.

To me, though, the fish were almost secondary, because the coral of the living reef looked as though Buckminster Fuller, Max Ernst, and Dr. Seuss had collaborated on it. There were long, pink- and blue-tipped asparagus, a thin damask-rose lace that a Spanish lady might have worn to church, expanses of olive-colored stiff scrub brushes, gorgonian fans, lurid striped erections, vaulting mauve domes, voluptuous yellow hydrangeas, orange dreadlocks, and fields of embossed purple grosgrain. Strange things rotated like lava lamps on turntables, and the mimosas of the sea seemed to recoil at our approach. By the time we got out, we were dizzy with color and sheer variety. Every day we sailed; every day we dived into the water; every day we saw wonders beyond all imagining.

After our immersion in the Melanesian culture of the Solomons, the nation’s primary culture, we wanted to see some of its Polynesian life. We left our beloved
Lalae
in Honiara and flew to Rennell, the largest of the Solomons’ Polynesian islands. Our guide, Joseph Puia, packed us into his car and we headed for Lake Tegano, the biggest freshwater lake in the South Pacific and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, stopping from time to time so that Joseph could machete with astonishing speed and assurance through trees that had fallen across the road.

The lake is dotted with islets of giant mangrove and pandanus and is home to a multitude of endemic flora and fauna, including unique birds and orchids; it also contains nine US planes downed
during World War II (two of which we could see when snorkeling). Because a US military base had stood by the lake during the war, locals still welcome Americans. Despite the best efforts of obtrusive missionaries, the lake people believe that the spirits of the dead travel as shooting stars to meet God beyond the eastern shore.

In our large, motorized canoe, we saw the famous sunrises over the water, visited the cave where the legendary lake octopus was said to have lived, and saw another cave that Joseph described as “formerly a residential accommodation”—villages have not existed very long on Rennell. We encountered flocks of glossy swiftlets, frigate birds, terns, cormorants, and ibis; as you approached their island rookeries they took to the skies by the hundreds, wheeling like a beautiful reworking of Hitchcock. We visited Circumcision Island, inhabited by the only South Pacific tribe to endorse the practice. We were thirsty, so our boatman shimmied up a tree, threw down fresh coconuts, and brought us limes with green skins and bright orange flesh, a 1960s fashion from the kingdom of fruit. We saw flying foxes, a species of fruit bat, both in the air and hanging in trees like the devil’s Christmas ornaments. We both saw and ate coconut crab, a local species that takes thirty-five years to mature.

Alas, we did not get off the island as planned; the flight was canceled for five days because of weather, and we spent those rainy afternoons in the depressing guest room of the island’s missionary center. We resisted the call to the local version of evangelical Christianity—John, by reading
Moby-Dick
; I, by writing this article about the wild and gentle new reality we had come to love.

A period of civil unrest followed our visit, but all seems to have calmed down again politically. A decade after its nomination, the Marovo Lagoon is still under consideration for designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While this matter was tied up in endless bureaucracy, the Solomon Islands were ravaged by earthquakes and consequent tsunamis in 2007, 2013, 2014, and 2015. Like Greenland, this area is feeling the effects of global warming:
coastal erosion, inundation, and saltwater intrusion are all on the rise. One province relocated its capital, Choiseul, because of rising tides—the first township in the Pacific to take such measures. The new site was constructed before residents were moved there in phases. The World Bank sent $9.1 million to the Community Resilience to Climate Change and Disaster Risk in Solomon Islands Project (CRISP) as part of a relief package for warming-induced problems. Some recent research indicates that these areas may face an additional challenge: shifting tectonic plates may be pulling the islands down at the same time that rising seas lap higher on their shores.

Far from the Tree
, 2012